When does a dialect become a language?
In this latest instalment of our translation industry updates, we’ll be looking at how and why we might distinguish dialects from languages, as well as thinking about some of the practical and ideological ways in which languages have been defined. We’ll also be considering the real-world implications of this in different parts of the world. Notions of language and identity are often very complex, and we have tried to provide something of an overview based on the sources listed at the bottom of this article, but if you’d like to share your own thoughts then please feel free to do so in the comments.
First of all, how do we separate ‘dialect’ from ‘language’? As with any big question surrounding languages, there are no clear-cut answers. It is often said that when two dialects cease to be mutually intelligible then they constitute separate ‘languages’, but even then we have to consider that dialects exist on a spectrum, meaning that Dialect B might be mutually intelligible with Dialects A and C, but Dialects A and C might not be mutually intelligible with one another.
Rightly or wrongly, another answer frequently given is that a ‘language’ conveys a level of prestige in the sense of having a writing system, literature, dictionaries, and possibly even an academy to regulate it. However, this also disregards the fact that in many cases languages with small numbers of speakers can be vastly more complex than those that are spoken globally, meaning that making a distinction along institutional lines alone is not necessarily always helpful.
Then, there are questions of whether a language is internationally recognised, and this also plays an important role in the notions of prestige and even power that surround the definition of of languages. In some cases, languages that are very closely related are regarded as being different when they fall under separate geographical boundaries, as noted by The Atlantic in relation to Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, or Czech and Slovak, with the languages within those two respective groups regarded as having a fairly high degree of mutual intelligibility.
Yet saying that a language correlates with nationality is not necessarily true in every case either. In many parts of the world, a single nation-state can have hundreds of languages that are also spoken widely across neighbouring countries, with many people in the region being fluent in multiple languages. Nigeria alone has over five hundred languages, which is more than the total for all of Europe.
Language is often seen as being an indicator of cultural unity, yet there can be considerable variation within languages as well as between them, particularly with languages that are spoken across a very broad geographical area. In some cases, a language can maintain a high level of mutual intelligibility even between speakers raised thousands of miles apart from one another, but in other cases the opposite can happen and a language that’s spoken across a large part of the world can absorb a high number of local elements in the places where it is spoken.
One of the most noteworthy examples of this is Arabic, which is spoken across a huge part of the world yet varies considerably within regions. The Atlantic describes the everyday Arabic of Morocco as being as different from the Arabic of Jordan as Czech is from Polish, yet Moroccans and Jordanians are not regarded as speaking separate ‘languages’ in the way that Czech and Polish speakers are. This has often been attributed to the fact that Arabic-speaking nations share many cultural traits and therefore it makes sense to consider all variants of Arabic as parts of the same ‘language’. Over in the Balkans, however, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Montenegrin have a fairly high degree of similarity but are still regarded as being distinct languages, which is in part linked to the complex history and politics of that region.
Sometimes, new languages have been defined as a result of shifting politics and a quest to create new national identities in post-colonial parts of the world. Writing in Medium magazine, Sam Quillen notes that Hindi and Urdu have a high degree of mutual intelligibility and were once collectively known as Hindustani, but following the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, Hindi and Urdu were designated as separate languages and written with different alphabets that resonated with each country’s particular history and identity (Devanagari script and the Persian alphabet respectively). And lastly, officially designating a form of speech as a language is also a means of recognising previously undervalued ways of speaking. Part of the reason behind a recent proposal to recognise patois as an official language of Jamaica alongside English is the fact that patois is the most widely-used means of communication on the island, even though, as The Week describes, it is not always equally appreciated.
We hope we’ve provided some interesting examples of how we imagine ‘languages’ and how this applies to different contexts, but with there being so much more to say on this topic, we’d be interested to receive your opinions too, so don’t hesitate to share your views in the comments.
Happy translating and language learning, and see you again for next month’s updates!
Sources
Will Patois become Jamaica's official language?
What’s a Language, Anyway?
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/difference-between-language-dialect/424704??
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